Email consumption behavior is changing at an unprecedented rate. The meteoric rise of mobile mail usage is fueled by the incredible adoption of both smartphones and tablets. Despite dramatic changes in consumption, innovation in email templates has remained minimal. But mobile mail clients are a secret weapon: their rendering capabilities are a world apart from their desktop counterparts. On mobile, you don’t need font tags. On mobile, you don’t need tables for layout. On mobile, we can build beautiful, engaging experiences that delight users, and we can do it more easily than ever before.

Anyone building a business, an app, or running a newsletter, wants to send great emails that will delight their readers and customers. In this talk I’ll present ways to leverage CSS3 as a platform for building rich, stunning mobile email experiences. After showing how CSS is a first-class citizen in native mobile email apps, I’ll move onto how we can incorporate some novel features into our emails by revisiting old HTML friends. I’ll demo just how far we can push these techniques, and reveal how a mobile future paints a very bright picture for the future of email as a whole.

Talk Outline:

The state of email consumption

Baseline mobile email experiences

Making email more human with subtle animation

Integrating dynamic content

Adding interaction and analytics

The mobile email toolbox

Targeting specific platforms

Lee Mallabone

LinkedIn

Lee has been passionate about email since he first dialed up in 1996. He is a long-time engineer, hacker, manager, product guy, data guy, and entrepreneur. He currently works at LinkedIn as a senior software engineer.

He blogs about cutting-edge front-end tools & technology at fonicmonkey.net